Defining Coteaching
At Cal Poly, we embrace the coteaching model for clinical practice in teacher education: Both cooperating teacher & teacher candidate are engaged in student learning through coplanning, coinstructing, & coassessing.
- Coplanning: The collaborative development of curriculum by coteachers who work together as peers proposing, discussing, and co-generating instructional plans
- Coinstructing: Two teachers in the classroom both contributing meaningfully to the learning process of students by assuming complementary roles during a lesson and utilizing a coinstructional strategy that best supports student learning
- Coassessing: Two teachers – working together as peers – to review the outcomes of an assessment of student learning OR to reflect on a lesson just taught for the purpose of improving instruction
We believe that engaging in reflective dialogue and collaboration leads to the professional development of both teachers.
Cogenerative Dialogue at the Core of Coteaching Components
For all coteaching components, discourse that is collaborative and provides space for both teachers’ ideas and questions to generate new ideas together is at the core. Roth, Tobin, and Zimmerman (2002) identify cogenerative dialogue as a catalyst to “describe what has happened, identify problems, articulate problems in terms of contradictions, and frame options that provide new and increased choices for enacting teaching and learning” (p. 6).
When engaged in cogenerative dialogue, both coteachers:
- Identify problems, pose questions, & seek solutions
- Share ideas
- Share explanation/justification of thinking
- Talk equally; balance of turn taking & contributions
- Uptake ideas equally
- Make decisions collaboratively
- Discuss/resolve disagreements collaboratively
Video Collection Organization
This website contains a collection of video clips showcasing exemplar coteaching, representing a variety of grades and disciplines. For each video clip, we identify the high-leverage practices modeled. We hope that coteachers will view these clips together, reflect on their own coteaching practice, and set goals for enhancing their collaboration as they learn together and support the learning of their PK-12 students.
Click on each button below to access the video clips, organized by coteaching component.
